Prashad, Vijay. Namaste Sharon: Hindutava and Sharonism Under U.S. Hegemony.

Prashad, Vijay. Namaste Sharon: Hindutava and Sharonism Under U.S. Hegemony. New Delhi, India: LeftWord Books, 2003. 111 pages. Paper Rs. 75.

VIJAY PRASHAD'S NAMASTE SHARON is an extremely important and timely book that needs to be taken note of by those doing research in Middle Eastern and South Asian studies, as well as in Arab American and Asian American studies. It is also a political intervention that makes clear what the stakes are in the recent alliances between Israel and India, and right-wing Indian American and pro-Zionist formations in the U.S. Prashad documents the histories and contours of these alliances, and also provides a crucial analysis of the ideological underpinnings of Hindutva (the belief in Hindu supremacy and a Hindu state) and Sharonism (right-wing Zionism) that have led to this convergence in the regions involved as well as in the diaspora.

The book is a short one, but it contains some critical information that has not been carefully documented before and that is useful for considering the implications of right-wing alliances. The argument of the book develops through four major pieces of the larger puzzle of the affair between Hindutva and Sharonism: it traces the India-Israel entente; analyzes the ideological and political convergence between Sharonism and Hindutva; situates it in the context of U.S. interests with respect to both nations and the larger regions; and examines the emerging alliance of Hindu fundamentalist and Zionist lobby groups in the U.S.

One of Prashad's main arguments is that "Hindutva-Sharonism" is a "bloc that functions as subcontractors for the messianic imperialism of the United States" (p. 7). India's engagement with Israel has emerged because of its interest in, and to, the United States, and it is significant because it reflects a major shift in India's position with respect to the now only remaining superpower. The story of the India-Israel-U.S. axis is a story of the political changes wrought by the emergence of U.S. empire. In 1949, India voted not to admit Israel into the United Nations; equally if not more important, India was the first non-Arab state to recognize the PLO as "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," it voted to censure Zionism as Racism in the UN in 1975, and it recognized Palestine as a state with the opening of the Palestinian embassy in New Delhi in 1988. Prashad notes that this was a period of "Indo-Arab solidarity" (p. 18), exemplified by the closeness of Nehruvian and Nasserite socialist nationalisms. For Prashad, this link was forged through a shared "anti-colonial secular republicanism" (p. 14). This sentiment was expressed forcefully in 1938 by none other than Mahatma Gandhi (somewhat ironic to consider in the present moment when his particular vision of non violent resistance is so often used to condemn Palestinian resistance):

   Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England
   belongs to the English ... It is wrong and inhumane to impose
   the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today
   cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct (p. 12).

I would also like to note that there was a popular consciousness about Palestine among Indians in the post-independence period: many of us recognized the Palestinians as engaged in an anti-colonial struggle similar to ours. This is the cultural politics of solidarity that underlies the geo-political and economic analysis offered in the book that might be important to think more about in light of the questions Prashad raises regarding different forms of affiliation. Prashad notes that while India officially recognized Israel in the 1950s, the affinity between India and Egypt, in particular, was largely a product of the politics of non-alignment of the Cold War era.

The book situates the reversal in Indo-Palestinian and Indo-Arab solidarity in the context of two major historical events: the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the emergence of the right-wing Hindu fundamentalists who occupied government office in India as the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) in 1988. Also threaded through this is the force Sharonism. Prashad argues that the affinity between Hindutva and Sharonism is not because Hindu fundamentalists feel sympathy for Zionist Jews, but because they share the ideology of framing Muslims as the enemy and admire the Sharonist strategy of ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion (pp. 25-26). It is worth noting that the early ideologues of Hindutva drew on the "principal fascist ideologues" in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, and that an unabashedly racist philosophy is at the core of Hindutva ideology--as well as, of course, of Sharonism. Hindutva's proponents admire what they see as the macho nationalism of military states such as Israel. An "Indian-born analyst at the Zionist Freeman Center in Houston" says bluntly, 'Islamic fascists see Bharat [India] as a soft spot ... India tries to placate them. Israel expels them. This is what Bharat should do. If they hate Hindu Rashtra so much they are free to leave for dar-ul-Islam." (p. 27).

The BJP fascists decided to get into bed with the Zionists based on their love of a shared hatred of Muslims--not necessarily on their love for each other--and also flirted with other repressive regimes, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, that are client-states of the U.S. Prashad's point is that states such as India, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia have engaged in a "new kind of Baghdad Pact" (p. 37) because they are eager to participate in "IMFundamentalism" through privatization, repression of their own populations, and compliance with U.S. interests, including U.S. support of and trade with Israel. This is a useful observation for it situates his analysis of the U.S.-Israel-India triangle in the larger context of global capitalism, even if only briefly.

According to Prashad, the Bush administration's war on terror through the "doctrine of pre-emption and of decisive force" means that "in a sense the U.S. government had finally become Israelis" (p. 34). There is an Escheresque helix here of initiation/emulation between the U.S. and Israel that he does not fully unravel, but it is clear that the National Security Strategy developed by the neoconservatives in Washington envisions what even Senator Edward Kennedy calls a "21st century American imperialism" (p. 32). Prashad is also right to argue that it is this imperialist project that uses Israel as a wedge to "discipline the petro-Sheikh allies" (p. 40) and that it is concerned with coordinating military strategy with India vis-a-vis Pakistan and China.

India's special strategic relationship with Israel is embedded in this military and economic context as much as in ideological kinship. Namaste Sharon provides a useful analysis of the three elements of this relationship: "arms sales, nuclear and missile defence programmes" and anti-terrorism operations (p. 61). For example, India has been buying Israeli arms since the Indo-China War of 1962, but today, India buys "half of Israel's total military exports" (p. 63). Another piece of information that not all may know is that Indian intelligence (the Research and Analysis Wing) cooperates with the Mossad in intelligence training and equipment sales to combat "Islamic militancy" (p. 72). The discussion of Israel's use of "Islamic militants" and "terrorists" to justify policies of settlements and closure to mete out collective punishment against the Palestinians will be familiar to anyone in Arab studies. What would perhaps have been useful to develop more explicitly is the notion of "Sharonism," in distinction to other forms of Zionism and to Hindutva, which has a different relationship to state power and history of nation-building--distinctions between deploying frameworks of "colonialism" and "communalism" in different geographic-political contexts, for example.

One of the most important, and revealing, sections of the book is the discussion of the recent alliance of the diasporic wings of both Hindutva and Zionism in the U.S. The Indian American Political Action Committee (USINAPAC) now works closely with AIPAC and the AJ Committee, who share strategies and make common cause against the presumed "jihadi" enemy in places such as Kashmir and Palestine. The information and analysis in the book provides very useful material uncovering fight-wing alliances of "fear and force" (p. 96), and it raises the question: what would the alternative be for progressives who oppose colonialism and communalism? What would a politics of solidarity look like for Palestinian/Arab American and Indian/South Asian American leftists? The book provides an important starting point for this critical discussion.

Prashad astutely points out that the myth of the model minority that supposedly binds Jewish Americans and Indian Americans misses the real underlying point of commonality between the two communities, which is political, not cultural, and shaped by the racism of the U.S. state. It would have been interesting to delve a bit more into the ambiguous racial identifications of Arabs and Indians in the U.S., and their relationships to varying forms of racism and racialization within Sharonism and Hindutva. But these are a lot of questions to ask of a small but excellent book that does so much timely work in documenting and analyzing political shifts that are of critical interest to anyone in Arab/American and Asian/American studies. Namaste Sharon will be invaluable in contributing to work in this area of comparative area and ethnic studies, and in advancing strategic discussions in their allied political movements, especially as the policies of the new Indian government become clearer.

Sunaina Maira teaches in the Asian American Studies Department, University of California, Davis.